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Glyndebourne: Britain's Very Special Music Festival: A Great Production of Carmen If Only Carmen Had Been There
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13401 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1987 |
1,293 Words |
| Author
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Herb Greer
Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright who lives in
Britain and on the Continent. |
Admit it cheerfully: Opera is a luxury. Opera is an extravagance, too, but in Britain one tries to avoid saying so. If you live here, you must pay twice for most opera tickets - at the box office, and again when it comes time to stump up for the annual tax demand. Once public money is involved, popular discussion of the arts is liable to become mealy-mouthed; one hears of cultural necessity, of national image, prestige, tradition, international respect, great this and great that, indeed anything but sheer low-minded indulgence, pleasure for the heck of it. Now, a lot of British opera is very good and gives plenty of enjoyment. But after forty years of the Welfare State, it is no longer proper to be ostentatious about the voluptuousness of such things. Sitting in a balcony or in an upper box at London's Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, you may well see spread out below you, in the most expensive stall seats, a respectable but dull-plumaged crowd. Barring a Royal gala or a spectacular first night, even the best-heeled audiences seldom match the lush haut-bourgeois surroundings.
I strongly disapprove of this sober mood. Is it really necessary to reduce one of our highest art forms to an earnestly cultural consumer product, to approach it in the spirit of a reformed drunk entering a Baptist mission service? There seems to me no good reason for blunting the sensibilities in this way. It is my firm belief that so-called appreciation - especially music appreciation - is a greatly over-considered response and that opera should be taken up with more hedonistic relish. This does not mean a passive experience. It means that the occasion should be played by the audience for as much pleasure as the performance onstage. The advantage of this is that any failings of production are offset by the recreation and delight of being there at all.
If you agree with me, then the Glyndebourne Festival Opera is your meat. To begin with, you pay only once. Glyndebourne is the only privately sponsored full-scale opera company in Britain, supported solely by ticket sales and backing from trusts, industrial sponsors, and individual patrons. Founded in 1934 as the personal manie of the late John Christie, it was sustained until the war years with his personal fortune. He converted his Elizabethan manor house on the Sussex Downs into a properly equipped theater. With the advice and help of his opera singer wife, Audrey Mildmay, he hired first-rate talent - Fritz Busch to conduct and Carl Ebert to produce a fortnight season of two Mozart operas. Before Christie died in 1962 he saw Glyndebourne grow from a small company specializing in Mozart into one of the world's major operatic venues. Today Christie's son is in charge,
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